Old Enough to Forget

When I first heard their version of "The Runner" ("Runner") I was enthralled. I can't tell you, (but I am going to) how many times I picked this album up and put it back. I loved the song, but I wasn't sold on getting an entire album by Manfred Mann. So I passed. Then time passed. A lot of time ... decades. A while ago I was wandering around a flea market and there were several vendors selling assorted records and charging a small ransom for really questionable stuff. I try not to be that guy but I think I may have blurted out "You have got to be kidding" more than once when asking "How much?" Then I stumbled upon a rather chill looking dude who had an old milk crate full of records. I flipped through and there were a couple of things that caught my eye, but it was Somewhere in Afrika that I pulled out. It was still in the shrinkwrap and looked pristine. He looked up and caught my eye. I asked, "How much?" He told me. I pulled o...

I recall hearing “I’m The Answer” on the radio by Simon back in 1983. The couple of times I heard it, it was always followed by a comment about Pete singing backing vocals, or Pete produced it, or Simon was Pete's little brother. It was a minor hit, or a near miss depending on how you look at it. I sort of liked it and I almost bought the record because it had a cool-looking cover. Simon was staring into the camera and pouting (his hair dresser gets a credit in the liner notes). He was either covered in grease or coal, depending on what kind of backstory you've invented to take up the obligatory 1,000 words the picture is supposed to conjure up. Coal or grease, the remarkable thing about the cover is the pristine white shirt. How did he keep the shirt clean? Sweet Sound was indeed produced by Simon’s elder brother, Pete, who had fifteen years on him. One could be forgiven for thinking this was nepotism at its worst. Except it wasn’t ... not really, though I’m sure it didn’t hur...

When I found Boys Brigade , it seemed familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. It didn’t matter. The immediate drawing card was seeing Geddy Lee’s name on the back as producer. The band was on Anthem Records, and honestly, even before hearing anything, I was assuming it was going to be good. Good it was. So good, and it was also a memory jogger too. “Melody” got modest play back in ’83, and it was a delightfully quirky song that was everything cool about the early ’80s. Oddly, whenever I hear the song, it feels a bit like Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers’ “Here Comes My Girl” - they really sound nothing alike, there’s just something about the atmosphere and delivery that makes me think of Petty - and I’m being sort of petty even comparing them. Heck, if I’m going to go all in, I may as well say that Boys Don’t Cry’s “I Wanna Be a Cowboy” sounds like they heard “Melody.” Whatever, none of this jibber jabber takes away from the song - it’s one of the highlights on the record (there a...

My goodness how time flies. Corey Hart may be best known for his breakthrough hit “Sunglasses at Night,” but up here in Canada this young man went on a tear, releasing one great album after another. As the ‘80s came to a close his commercial momentum started to wane, someone forgot to tell me - I kept picking up his stuff right through to Jade in 1998. I can’t believe this record came out in 1983. That makes it over forty friggin’ years old. I've written about a couple of his other albums but it was fun going back to the beginning, there was something about this album that just worked. Here was a guy who was all of 21 when it came out, writing all the words and music himself. And somehow he even managed to get Eric Clapton to play dobro on “Jenny Fey.” Goodness, how bloody cool is that? Cool. It was just cool. I don’t think the folks at Aquarius Records had any idea what they had when they first released First Offense . The album started to break, and even a non-album single, “Lamp...

Back in the mid '80s when I was working downtown I'd often spend my lunch hour rummaging through the racks at A&B Sound, or if I was in the mood to dumpster dive Sam the Record Man had row after row of discount records. I picked up a lot of questionable stuff, like Stephen Still's Thoroughfare Gap  and Dan Fogelberg's Captured Angel ... don't ask why I remember those two in particular. It's not like I remember anything from them. I'm not shitting on the records, I just don't remember them, but I remember buying them. I don't think I played them more than once or twice. I also remember one album I kept seeing and ignoring: Coney Hatch's Outa Hand. Over the years I'd see the Carl Dixon's name pop up. Sort like a Canadian Waldo. Oh look, there he is with April Wine ... oh man, that's cool. Hey Aldo Nova is covering a Coney Hatch song written by Carl, "Hey Operator" nice. Look there's Carl on the Speed Channel doing mu...

When I found this album back in '83 it had a remainder cut out on the cover. Makes one wonder what Capital records thought was going to happen with a three song vanity project from Brian May. Me, I loved this from the moment I saw it ... I just knew, KNEW it was going to be awesome. I was determined to love this no matter what. How hard could it be to love something that had Brian May and Eddie Van Halen on the same album? Apparently not hard at all ... but harder than I first thought ... but it didn't matter. Rounding out the friends, was drummer Alan Gratzer (REO Speedwagon), bassist Phil Chen (Rod Steward, Jeff Beck, Joan Armatrading) and Fred Mandel (Alice Cooper, Domenic Troiano, Queen and Pink Floyd) on keyboards. These boys could play. As Brian writes on the back cover essay this was just supposed to be a hang and jam with some people he had wanted to play with. You can practically hear the songs coming together. The three songs on the MINI LP are essentially an audible ...

Ladies and gentlemen, The Elvis Brothers. I stumbled on their 1985 release Adventure Time a few years ago and really liked it, which sent me hunting for their other records ... and where I live they're a little harder to find but as it turns out not impossible, as I have found the first two records. I found not one, but two copies of Screams (I sent the other to a friend who lives in Illinois who was trying to find a copy), the band Brad was in back in the late '70s. Their first couple of albums came out on Portrait, and when the label folded in ’86, the band went on hiatus for seven years. I doubt I’ll ever track it down, but the original trio took one last kick at the can in ’92 with Now Dig This  - after which they once again faded into the pop ether. I found a pretty nice copy of their debut  Movin' Up by accident (it happens) last April and I immediately sent a pic to my buddy Jeff who wrote back without missing a beat telling me which tracks he really liked. I hav...

The first time I heard "Owner of a Lonely Heart" on the radio, I was smitten. "What in the heck was that?" It was one of those HOLY SHIT songs that seemed to come out of nowhere. KISM from Bellingham had a strong enough signal to reach over into the suburbs where I lived. The song quickly worked it's way into heavy rotation, but I don't remember hearing it on the two big stations in Vancouver. It took me a while to find the record after first hearing the song. There was a record store across the street from where I worked and I looked for this new Yes album, and all I found where the old Yes records, nothing new. Of course this only happened once, and I'm sure this was all compressed into the span of a couple of weeks, if that. Soon the song along with the bleeding edge orchestral blasts that were unlike anything I'd heard before was everywhere. This was Yes? Yes. Of course there was no internet back in the day, just word of mouth and the burgeon...

Journey released Frontiers in '83 and the band was messing around with their winning recipe. The band had always been good, but the addition of Jonathan Cain, who took over keyboards from Gregg Rolie after 1980's Departure  gave the band an extra gear. Jonathan co-wrote all of the songs on Frontiers except for "Faithfully" which he brought to the band. Heck he was all over Escape too, but that's another story. You can read it here if you want ... or not. The band had gone diamond with Escape , a nearly impossible feat to replicate and I'm sure there was more than a little tension in the studio as they cut the tracks. I know that Journey was supposed to be Neal's band (according to Neal), and in many ways it is, but when Steve Perry arrived it was Neal and Steve, and then with Jonathan he became the third leg of the milking stool. I'm not dismissing Ross or the other Steve. Those guys were integral to the band's sound ... right up to when they weren...

After four albums it was time for the mandatory live record. Coming on the heels of Pat Benatar's Get Nervous Tour she released an odd hybrid album titled Live from Earth . The album was 80% live and two new studio tracks: the awesome "Love is a Battlefield" and the throwaway "Lipstick Lies" that is perplexingly bland. The band here was tight, Neil Geraldo on guitar, Myron Grombacher on drums, Roger Capps on bass and Charlie Giordano on keyboards. Neil runs the band through its paces, and for the most part the results are pretty decent, and in a couple of instances spectacular. His guitar tone at times was questionable and overly processed, but heck it was the early '80s and that was a thing. At the time it was cool. The album as you'd expect mines a little more from her latest album, but that's not a bad thing, it was top of mind to her audience. What was weird though was the omission of "Shadows of the Night" one of the best songs from th...

Spoons were never a band that was on my radar back in the day. I knew who they were, "Nova Heart" was a pretty great song, but there were a lot of great songs that never made it into my collection. Talkback  was produced by Nile Rodgers. Bowie's Let's Dance  was the other project Mr. Rodgers produced in '83. Oddly enough Nile passed over Culture Club who were hotter than something that was really hot to produce Talkback by Spoons. You'd have thunk that this would have helped secure Spoons a decent distribution deal ... but nope. Talkback would only see the light of day in Canada. Good for us I guess, bad for them and everyone else. Like the band's previous album Arias & Symphonies , Talkback would go gold in Canada, but the band's subsequent releases wouldn't fare so well. The big single was "Old Emotion" which is a song I sort of like and am sort of irritated by. The whammy bar dives never worked for me. It's not like Gordon Depp...

Well that didn't take long. I had mentioned didn't have the last Toronto album* when I was writing about the band's previous album Get It On Credit ,  (posted September 17, 2025) and sure enough when I was rummaging through the discount bins at Krazy Bobs there it was ... along with a baker's dozen other albums that came with me. I know there was one more album under the Toronto banner,  Assault & Flattery that was attributed Holly Woods & Toronto. Aside from Holly Woods, keyboardist Scott Kreyer was the only other member as Sheron Alton and Brian Allen were no longer in the band, so for me Girl's Night Out is the last album by the classic line up that dropped an album a year from 1980 to 1983. A blip on the radar but they left an indelible mark on Canadian rock. I know I've taken some pot shots at the band in the past and have been lukewarm to their albums as a whole. They always had a great single, and while I'd enjoy the albums they just never see...

Author's warning.*  After selling 5,000,000 copies of his break through album American Fool  in the US. John was back in '83 with Uh-Huh and proceeded to go triple platinum. However, here is Canada he was moved half a million copies of each album. He was pretty big deal here ... and he'd be a big deal for a while. I was never really a big John Cougar Mellencamp fan, I'm still not, but I like him enough to buy his albums when I find them. Oh make no mistake he was decent and in small doses pretty awesome. There was something about a whole album of John's tunes that just felt overly long. I'd almost go so far as to describe a lot of it as unvarnished pretentious rock and roll. A better name for the album would be Nuh Uh. John was earnest in his pursuit of grandeur. To be fair for all the clunkers he'd then come out with an absolute barn burner. I didn't know it at the time, but John was carving his own niche. Americana wasn't really a thing I was awar...